The Federal Emergency Management Agency is failing to pay out disaster aid in hurricane-stricken Puerto Rico and struggling to work with the commonwealth’s government, according to federal contractors on the ground and the agency’s own internal data.
FEMA is months behind deadline for disbursing billions in disaster aid owed to the commonwealth government, its towns, and its residents nearly two years after Hurricane Maria struck.
Only a fraction of the money approved by Congress through FEMA has been delivered, just $380 million of permanent recovery work, a failure that belies President Trump’s complaints that the territory and its 3.2 million U.S. citizens have received too much money.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates Puerto Rico experienced $90 billion worth of damage from the storm.
FEMA representative Abbey Dennis argued that dollar amounts alone were not sufficient for measuring recovery progress. “Every disaster is different,” Dennis said in an email to the Washington Examiner. “Numbers alone cannot and do not provide a complete picture of what is needed to help communities recover.”
Hurricanes Maria, Irma, and Harvey, which struck the U.S. in 2017, were three of the five most costly ever, according to government estimates. While FEMA has committed billions to debris removal and immediate response across those areas, only a small fraction of that was for permanent recovery efforts.
According to Dennis, FEMA has thus far delivered nearly $320 million to permanent recovery work related to Harvey, and nearly $220 million in Florida, which was hit by Irma.
But multiple best practices contractors brought in to consult FEMA’s efforts in Puerto Rico said that there were unusual problems with the recovery efforts there, exacerbated by what they saw as cultural problems within the agency.
Puerto Rico’s preexisting $70 billion debt crisis means that federal funds are even more important for the U.S. territory than in a normal disaster recovery effort.
“You have to repair the bridges and roads, you have to repair the infrastructure that was damaged, the electricity grid was damaged,” Natalie Jaresko, the executive director of the federal oversight board empowered by Congress to manage Puerto Rico’s finances, said during a press briefing to discuss debt recovery efforts on Wednesday.
“The influence of the federal funds that have come to date, albeit perhaps not as much as anyone expected, not as much as is needed, and not as quickly as needed … have an effect on this economy.”
In recent interviews, contractors recently on the ground described a recovery effort bogged down by ineffective operations and bureaucracy, with many describing it as “a clusterf–k.” Some who were veterans of past FEMA operations described it as the most dysfunctional effort they had ever seen from the agency. All estimated that FEMA had completed only about 1% to 5% of the total amount of permanent recovery work it needs to do.
“Literally, there’s very few things that have gone through. It’s all stuck,” said Jeff Wykoski, a former General Electric and Verizon executive brought in to help FEMA apply private sector operational practices to the Puerto Rico effort. “To put even a simple change through was very difficult, you had to go through five levels.”
According to data from the software system FEMA uses to create and track disaster assistance grant requests on the island, the damage assessments filed to fund repairs, ranging from individual houses to schools, bridges, and roads, are nearly as likely to be rejected for reporting flaws as accepted.
As of mid-June, 48% of the site inspection filings submitted for disaster assistance grants were found to be defective by FEMA’s office for quality assurance and control and sent back for reevaluation. That defect rate does not include any inspection reports that were rejected multiple times, meaning the total rejection rate may be much higher.
One best practices consultant interviewed by the Washington Examiner proposed a new software system that would enable site inspectors to provide photos of the structures they surveyed taken with phones or tablets to go along with the paperwork they filed.
But FEMA officials stymied the proposal, Wykoski and others on his team said, by placing the bar to prove it could work too high.
“They were looking at an iPad or iPhone-type of application where you could go on a site visit, take pictures on the phone, mark it up, and standardize a report to make it much more error-proof,” said Wykoskyi. “There’s a lot of internal politics of you thought of it, I didn’t, so I’m not going to do it.”
FEMA has began to reevaluate the proposal to combine mobile imaging with standard paperwork filing after a year of dysfunction with FEMA’s current software system for damage assessment filings, multiple contractors said.
Recovery efforts also faltered because of distrust between FEMA and the commonwealth government, the contractors claimed. Because of problems with the territorial government’s recordkeeping noted by the federal board overseeing Puerto Rico’s recovery, FEMA instituted tighter controls than normal for its disaster relief efforts.
“They initiated a program where FEMA forced the government of Puerto Rico to submit for funds on a case by case basis instead of releasing a tranche of funds because Puerto Rico could not provide the documentation required by public assistance legislation,” said one of the contractors who had worked with FEMA for years and asked not to be named so as not to put future work at risk.
Dennis, the FEMA representative, confirmed that the territory’s debt contributed to the decision to require an “additional level of review” for funding but said that FEMA recently removed that added scrutiny in March on the grounds that the commonwealth government demonstrated that it could successfully track the money.
Another factor contributing to the dysfunction is that FEMA site inspectors and the Puerto Rico government inspectors who accompany them to disaster sites offer differing cost estimates. Contractors involved in on-the-ground assessments described Puerto Rico personnel attempting to overestimate storm damage to improve infrastructure that was neglected for years before the storm, slowing disbursement of funds.
“There would be a rusted side on the water tank and bolts coming off and the [commonwealth] guys would go, ‘see, see, that’s from the storm,’” said Dan McCabe, another best practices consultant deployed by FEMA to the island. “They kind of exacerbated the problem by some of the actions that they did, I think.”
Dennis responded by saying that “mischaracterizations of the collaboration efforts between FEMA and COR3 [Puerto Rico’s agency responsible for recovery efforts] serve no purpose in this recovery effort and undermine the important work being done on the island. FEMA remains committed to maintaining a positive working relationship with the Commonwealth to help support Governor [Ricardo] Rossello’s vision for a better Puerto Rico.”
FEMA also attempted a disaster recovery approach that differed from that of previous efforts. The agency organized its efforts into 12 different sectors, such as communications, energy, water and sewage, and public buildings. While best practices contractors brought in to streamline FEMA’s operations thought the approach held promise, several told the Washington Examiner that they found FEMA managers refused to cooperate across sectors and that formal operational guidelines for the sector approach weren’t put in place until over a year after recovery efforts began, which also contributed dysfunction to the process.
Despite concerns over the slow recovery, contractors now worry that FEMA will overcorrect and disburse funds to projects that would not normally qualify in an effort to show more progress to Congress.
On April 30, COR3 requested an extension for providing cost estimates for permanent recovery work. FEMA told the Washington Examiner that despite the slow pace of the estimate process, the agency plans to stick with its initial Oct. 11 deadline, though the agency says it may make exceptions on a project-by-project basis.
“They’re in disaster management far worse now than when the disaster happened,” said Wykoski. “They’re trying to get things through and they’re cutting corners.”
